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Whither Joe Ross?

06-18-2017, 09:33 PM

He had a good outing last time, and this time, you could make the case that he was a victim of bad breaks. But I remain concerned by the loss of velocity after about 70 pitches, as FP has pointed out on the broadcast. Looking at his rookie season stats, his delta between the fastball and slider was close to 10 mph; but while his average fastball has slowed down, his average slider has gained a couple of mph. Not good. Still suspicious that there's something physically different that's impeding him.

“He kept his ball down most of the time,” Baker told reporters when asked about the outing by Ross after the loss. “He had pretty good command. His changeup is getting better, because the speed differential is a lot better, so he’s been working on that to get left-handers out, and right-handers.”

“But he threw some quality changeups,” Baker continued, “because usually the speed differential is only four-to-five miles an hour, but it was like 11-12 miles an hour which is really good and showed a lot of progress.”

Brooksbaseball.net had Ross’s change at an average of 85.8 mph, down slightly from his 86.1 mph average this season, and about seven miles an hour off the pace of his sinker, which averaged 92.8 on Sunday, (up slightly from 91.7 this year), and he threw eight of 13 changeups for strikes, generating seven swings and three misses with the pitch, and mixed in 33 sliders, 25 for strikes, generating 21 swings and nine swings and misses.

Ross also threw 33 of 57 sinkers for strikes, generating 22 swings, and one swinging strike with the pitch, and 13 put in play, four of them for hits.

“Joe threw the ball well,” Baker said, noting that two of the four runs he allowed came after the Lucas Duda pop to right that fell in for the first of four hits Ross gave up in the fourth when Daniel Murphy lost it in the sun.

“Had we — that one sun ball, I was hoping that one of our outfielders would have been close enough to kind of help Murph on that ball, but you could tell that he was in trouble and then that led to two runs, and Joe, in reality, really only should have given up two runs.”